Not for years had she heard directly of the Greylocks, and while she listened she felt that the streak of cruelty in her own nature was slowly appeased. "I wonder why he never went North again?" Nathan said, as he rose to undress. "I remember he told me once years ago that all he wanted was a quiet life. He didn't care a damn for the farm, he said, he'd always hated it." Yes, it was true, he had always hated it. Through his whole life he had been tied by his own nature to the thing that he hated. When the tenth of August came, Dorinda put on her best dress, a navy blue and white foulard which Leona Prince, the new dressmaker, had cut after the fashionable "Princesse style." She was waiting on the porch when Nathan, who had just removed his overalls, looked out of the window to ask if they were going to walk. "No, let's have the surrey." For a reason which she did not stop to define she preferred the long way by the road to the short cut over the fields. "Lena wants to go with us." Nathan whistled. "What on earth has she got up her sleeve now?" If she had spoken the thought in her mind, Dorinda would have replied tartly, "She wants to go because she thinks men will be there"; but instead she answered simply, "Oh, she's always ready to go anywhere." "Well, can't she walk? It ain't over a mile by the short cut." "She's afraid of seed ticks. Besides, she's putting on her flowered organdie." "What on earth?" Nathan demanded a second time. Then, after a meditative pause, he added logically, "I reckon she's got her eye open for young Jim Ellgood, but she'll be disappointed." Lena had recently turned her seductions in a new direction; and Dorinda was divided between pity for the victim, a nice boy of twenty, and the fervent hope that Lena might be safely, if not permanently, settled. To be sure, young Jim had given no sign as yet of responding to her energetic advances; but the girl had never failed when she had gone about her business in a whole-hearted fashion, and Dorinda remained optimistic though vaguely uneasy about the results. Of course her step-daughter was the last wife in the world for a farmer. Scheming, capricious, dangerously oversexed, and underworked, she had revealed of late a chronic habit of dissimulation, and it was impossible to decide whether she was lying for diversion or speaking the truth from necessity. Yet none of these moral imperfections appeared to detract an iota from the advantage of a face like an infant Aphrodite, vacant but perfect as the inside of a shell. A deplorable waste of any good man's affection, thought Dorinda. However, she had ceased long ago to worry over what she could not prevent, and she had observed that the strongest desires are directed almost invariably toward the least desirable. "I am not sure that it is young Jim," she said, firm but indefinite. "Anyhow, you'll have to hitch up the surrey. The weeds would tear that dress to pieces."